Stories Joan Didion told before she died: A trip to the writer’s intimate archives

On March 3, 1966, Joan Didion wrote “Quintana!” in her hardcover red journal. It was the day that she and her husband John Gregory Dunne adopted their only daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. On January 30, 1964, when the couple wed, Didion limited herself to noting “Oh no!” Then, on the following day: “I’m smiling again.”

The two diaries are drops of water in the ocean of archival literary and personal documents of Didion and Dunne, one of the most famous and sophisticated couples of U.S. literature and journalism, which the New York Public Library recently made available to researchers and fans, particularly those focused on Didion’s legacy. In total, the archives are comprised of more than 336 boxes, occupying some 150 linear feet, in addition to 9.8 megabytes of archival information and 52 audio and 19 video recordings. The institution acquired the collection (for an undisclosed amount) in 2023, when little more than a year had passed since the death of Didion, the last surviving member of her family, at 87 from complications due to Parkinson’s.

It’s tempting to interpret the two brief diary entries through the public image of a writer famous for her distance, who managed to preserve a certain enigmatic aura despite writing extensively about herself. Her published ruminations included a copious number of notes on the world in which she lived, from the Manson murders to the Reagan years, from the trial and wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five — Black and Hispanic men imprisoned for the brutal rape of a white woman they did not commit — to her exile in Miami.

Her autobiographical texts are famous, and the archive includes what could be a modest addition to the canon. She wrote it in 2002 for a reunion of former students marking the 50th anniversary of her high school class in Sacramento. It is in a box with the rest of her high school yearbooks, and in it, she summarized without embellishment what her life had been like after graduation: her time at UC Berkeley, the promise of New York after winning a contest to work at Vogue, marriage to Dunne, their move to Los Angeles — where they lived “two years in Portuguese Bend, five in Hollywood, seven in Malibu and 10 in Brentwood” — the birth of Quintana, the return to New York in 1988, and the novels and volumes of essays and screenplays co-authored with her husband. This last body of work, she writes, is what “essentially” allowed them to live without worrying about money (and that relief would also explain why they always had room in their many homes for so many papers, and how they survived all those moves).

The NYPL diaries include notebooks from 1964 to 2013 and are divided into 16 boxes, two of which, similar to other materials, are restricted until 2050 because they “contain personal information.” Rather than revealing secrets, these notebooks served as a place to jot down ideas, literary and film quotes, phone numbers, what to cook on the evenings that the couple had guests, and above all, who owed her money for the articles she published in magazines and newspapers. In one of them, there is proof she was a young Republican: an election sticker for Barry Goldwater, the losing candidate in the 1964 presidential election. She could easily go weeks or months without writing anything down. “At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary,” she wrote in her 1960 essay On Keeping a Notebook. “My approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent.”

Nor did Didion fill the journals she used in her reporting, or at least, she didn’t fill the ones that were consulted during two trips to the library’s manuscript room, during which there was only time to scratch the archive’s surface. In the one she used during 1982 for her dispatches to The New York Review of Books about the civil war in El Salvador — which were eventually collected into a book — her notes are written in unintelligible, occasionally struck-through script, alternating with blank pages and instructions for how to get to the presidential home “by the zoo.”

Perhaps the excess of paper was good thing. When Didion died, an auction was held of some of her belongings, and a batch of 13 unused notebooks. From a starting price of $100, these went for $11,000. The rest of the sale was also a success: $1.9 million was raised for two charitable causes: the fight against Parkinson’s disease and a residence for female authors in Sacramento, the city where Didion was born in 1934. She wrote of the city, “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”

A knack for business

The auction proved both the business acumen of the nephews who manage her legacy and the star status of an author whose novels, essays, and reporting guaranteed her not only a place in the literary pantheon but also a large fan base, seduced in part by her distant, effortlessly elegant, fragile yet determined image, with which the fashion world also identified. Didion was perhaps the writer most photographed for advertising purposes. She was sought out well into her eighties, and her final campaign was for Céline.

That fame extends beyond the walls of the library’s Fifth Avenue headquarters. According to one of its employees, her archive has been the most consulted since the day it opened in March. Requests for her boxes far outnumber those for her husband’s, though their legacies are undeniably intertwined.

Didion and Dunne were together for 29 years. They were one of those couples with opposite-yet-complementary personalities, the kind that finishes each other’s sentences. They also edited each other, and rose above various crises and infidelities, the most famous of which drove her to seek refuge. She spoke of it in her second book of essays, The White Album (1979). “I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together […] We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Didion watched her husband die on December 30, 2003. He collapsed in their Manhattan apartment at dinnertime after suffering a heart attack. They had just returned from visiting the hospital to see their daughter, who would die 20 months later. The experience of losing Dunne led Didion to write The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), a superb account of grief and one of her most famous books.

The successive drafts of this text, which share a box with scientific articles about death, allow one to explore Didion’s creative process. In it are the words that open the book (“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant”) followed by a reflection on 9/11 (she would never again see an airplane in a clear blue sky without feeling uneasy); a photocopy of the statement given by the doorman from their building, with its flash of banality (“Mr. Dunne was taken to hospital at 10:05 p.m. NOTE: -- Light bulb out on A-B passenger elevator”); and a note in which the writer tells of how a catalog arrived from Brooks Brothers, Dunne’s favorite brand, and she felt the need to buy everything that she’d thrown out from their closet after he died.

Didion almost always writes the complete name of her husband in her journals and diaries, “John Gregory Dunne,” or his initials “JGD”; almost never simply “John.” Curiously, her executors have titled the first, and possibly last, book of unpublished material from the archive Notes for John. It compiles the reports she wrote for him about her visits to a psychiatrist between 1999 and 2002, a time when he was suffering from depression and tormented by alcoholism and the borderline personality disorder of their daughter, who would die from pancreatitis at the age of 39.

The publication of this book has given life to the classic debate: would the author have wanted these 125 notebook pages about her therapy published, having left no instructions to that effect? Alexandra Jacobs, in The New York Times, defends the decision, because “the principals exposed here… are dead” — as has the psychiatrist, Roger McKinnon — and because “in 2025,” writes Jacobs, “we should be saying hallelujah that people still want to see these and not just some influencer’s nudes.”

Tracy Daugherty, author of the most complete Didion biography (The Last Love Song, 2015) says he is “troubled” by the book’s publication. “The details of a creator’s life are important to the extent that they illuminate the art and its cultural moment. Craving all their secrets is missing the point,” he writes in an email sent last week. “On the other hand, the ‘cult of Joan’ troubles me.”

Daugherty also recalls that the author was “incapable of writing an incorrect sentence, even when she was taking notes.” As such, when reading the new book, one wonders if Didion would have approved of a text in which the verb “said” is repeated 1,087 times in just over 200 pages. “I imagine it was influenced by the fact that there was no other unpublished material in the archive,” Evelyn McDonnell, author of The World According to Joan Didion, explains to EL PAÍS in a video call. McDonnell defines her own book as more of a “road map” to the writer’s life and work than a traditional biography. “These Notes for John don’t paint her in a good light. There are interesting revelations in them — certainly, I found them interesting — but in a way, they prove that she wasn’t honest about what happened.”

Didion returned to the same events in Blue Nights (2012), a book in which she tells of the long medical and emotional nightmare of losing her daughter. “Her brand was her commitment to writing honestly and rigorously about herself and her world,” says McDonnell. “Upon reading these notes, you realize that’s not what she did when it came to her daughter: she tiptoed around her addiction and mental health problems.”

Traces of Quintana Roo are scattered throughout the NYPL boxes. Didion kept her adoption papers, as well as the planning, bills, and the speech she wrote for her wedding. There are numerous school projects and drawings Quintana gave them on birthdays and Mother’s and Father’s Days.

There are also the portraits that Quintana took of both of them when she decided to pursue photography professionally, as well as letters of recommendation from the famous journalist to try to get her daughter, whom she used to call “Q” and “Mouse,” featured in New York magazines. There is a large file folder with a single item: a collage mentioned in Blue Nights, with a clipping of a poem by Karl Shapiro published in the 1960s in The New Yorker that Didion hung on several of her refrigerators. Perhaps the most striking document, however, is a letter signed in 1998 by a woman named Erin Vaughan, who informs Quintana that she is looking for her “birth sister” and suspects that it might be her. She also asks her to mark the relevant answer: “I am not adopted” or “I don’t want to be contacted.” Months later, Quintana agreed to meet the woman, as well as her biological mother. That did not turn out well.

Quintana also appears cited in the letters her parents received from their friends, nearly all of them famous editors, writers and reporters. The list of senders is impressive. Charles Schulz, father of Snoopy, declares himself having been a fan of Didion ever since he read the phrase (“The center was not holding”) that opens Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her famous report on the ruin of the 1960s San Francisco hippie scene. Photographer Richard Avedon is one of their most consistent and attentive correspondents. Writer Eve Babitz — initially a friend, then an enemy — wishes them a merry Christmas, as does Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, while countercultural leader Timothy Leary sends his account of having ingested a “wondrous drug,” while still under its effect.

The most abundant correspondence, however, is that related to cinema, the couple’s main focus during the decade during which they wrote films like The Panic in Needle Park (1971) and A Star is Born (1976). The documentation of these projects is an important part of the archive, which includes sections dedicated to publishing contracts, the gestation of novels like Play It as It Lays (1970) and Democracy (1984), prizes and journalism, from typed notes for profiles of Joan Baez and Black Panther Huey Newton to credentials from the Democratic and Republican conventions that the couple covered in the 1980s.

When it comes to letters from film buffs, there are plenty from personalities of both New Hollywood, a constant presence at their Malibu home, and the old. Didion published a flattering profile of John Wayne, and the actor thanked her with a note and a bottle of champagne, which surely didn’t last long in the Dunne’s cellar, as both were renowned drinkers. “Having a woman write like that about a fellow doesn’t hurt his ego a bit,” Wayne joked, while Billy Wilder sarcastically thanked her for a positive review in Vogue of the misunderstood Kiss Me, Stupid (1964). “I read your piece in the beauty parlor while sitting under the hair-dryer, and it sure did the old pornographer’s heart good.”

For McDonnell, as a biographer, the most surprising letter is one sent from one of Didion’s parents. It’s there among the papers pertaining to her family, 19th century California pioneers, along with her birth certificate featuring her tiny footprint. The missive in question is one of the few pieces of correspondence of which the NYPL has preserved both the sender’s and recipient’s letters. It comes from her father, writing what appears to be a suicide note: “Something has developed beyond our control, which makes me believe I won’t be around much longer.”

Frank Didion did not commit suicide, but his daughter did inherit his depressive personality. In Notes for John, she speaks to her psychiatrist about this letter, and tells how during the same period, she went to see her father in the mental hospital into which he had been admitted. They went out to a restaurant together and he “only wanted to eat oysters.”

In another session, she confesses that she’s been thinking about her life, “if it has been worth it,” and asks “what kind of legacy” she will leave behind. That legacy, in part, has wound up safely in the New York Public Library. Reading this passage, it is easy to think that Didion, who was 65 at the time, had already begun to search — to paraphrase her most famous line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — for the stories that sooner or later, she would need in order to die.

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